Louise P. Sloane - Artists - Spanierman Modern

Since 1974 Louise P. Sloane has been engaged in the studio as an abstract painter. Each of her works are infused with highly personal text that inspires and motivates her to keep growing and experimenting.

Louise P. Sloane’s paintings emanate from a long and rich tradition in art history. The visual language of Sloane's paintings embrace the legacy of reductive and minimalist ideologies while celebrating the beauty of color, and a human affinity for mark making.

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, J.M.W. Turner pushed the limits of using dramatic color. In 1839, a French chemist named Michel Eugene Chevreul published his treatise on the vibrant interaction of the complementary pairings of color, which include, red-green, orange-blue and yellow-violet. Monet rejoiced in the complementary colors’ tendency to reinforce one another, painting red poppies in green fields. It was in this vein that van Gogh, after painting The Night Cafe in Arles, explained to his brother Theo, "I tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by contrasts of red and green."

Georges Seurat evolved a system. An honorary founding father of Op Art, Seurat painted dots in colors he knew would dissolve, or 'optically mix' in the eyes of the beholder. The Fauves, and especially Matisse, took the next step, severing color's dependence upon nature. After World War II, the Abstract Expressionists liberated color once and for all from representation. Mark Rothko aspired to paint tragedy in brooding tones of purple. After ten intensive years of achievement, the works of Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning spoke for themselves.

Painters that came of age around 1960 were determined to go in an opposite direction. Some of these artists spoofed the new consumer culture, others ignored it. All of them responded to the arresting colors and hard edges of its graphic design. They accomplished this by employing all kinds of abstract forms and color contrasts that stimulated the partnership of eye and mind. Many artists experimented with one or more 'Op' techniques, as they came to be called, in exactly the same creative spirit that many twentieth-century painters and sculptors studied Cubism without a thought of becoming 'cubists'.

Louise P. Sloane joins the ranks of a small but mighty group of great artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Anton Albers and Barnett Newman. Like these monumental artists before her, she has dedicated her life's work to exploring the limitless possibilities of a single theme; an insistence on color.

The work focuses upon geometric forms, grids and patterns. These detail-oriented works are typically divided into rectangles or squares. The square has become a repetitive motif, which along with the grid provides structure for all of these paintings. Similar compositional principles underlie each work with some slight modifications. Commonly the image is divided into five parts: four rectangles and a central square. Whether the square is dimensionally similar to the outer rectangles or not, it always dominates, creating a central core for the flow of the painting. It is important that the works present themselves as human made objects. Not wanting to obfuscate the traditional precepts of reductive art, she utilizes this rich past and moves forward through her modifications and additions. The flaws and imperfections of the repetitive handmade patterns and physical motion and depth of paint are accentuated by the geometric formalities within the paintings’ structure. Regardless of the painting’s texture and color, the square prevails, providing harmony and unity. The complex color contrasts intensify the three dimensionality of the texture, and compete for the viewer’s focus, keeping the eyes and mind in constant motion, fusing my interests in geometry, color, and light.

Sloane’s paintings have been shown in a multitude of museums including, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Hunterdon Museum of Art, Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Cornell Museum of Art and History, and the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art.